Many techniques have been developed to improve the quality of digital imaging. In particular, techniques have been developed to make the imaging more real and less 2-dimensional. One known technique is to add shadows or shading generated by light sources. Numerous techniques have been developed, for example, as disclosed by GB2267409 and the paper IEEE Transactions on multimedia, vol. 1, No. 2, June 1999 “Augmented Reality with Automatic Illumination Control Incorporating Ellipsoidal Models” Jürgen Stauder.
However, these techniques do not go far enough. There is an increasing demand by users to feel more immersed in what they are viewing “as if they are there”, particularly in interactive systems such as video telephony.
With the growing amount of people having access to broadband Internet, voice over IP (VoIP) applications are being used more and more and Internet video telephony will be more widely available.
Much of the research to date in this area has focused on improving the audiovisual quality of video telephony by signal processing means. To date high audiovisual quality and low communication delay has been recognized as key for large-scale breakthrough of video telephony.
Even with perfect audiovisual quality, even with 3D images on a very large screen with 3D sound, and with minimal communication delay, there are fundamental differences between mediated person-to-person communication (video telephony) and person-to-person communication at the same place. One such aspect concerns the fact that if you are in a room with someone else, you influence the lighting conditions in the room by your very presence: depending on the location of light sources you create a shadow on walls and/or on the person with whom you are talking. With video telephony you do not influence the lighting conditions in the other room, and therefore there is not a feeling of “as if you are there” even with the highest audiovisual quality.